This hack is a complete make over of planet Zebes level-design wise, very few rooms actually look like they used to be. The planet is a little bigger now, it still relies on the original region structure but layed out differently. The gameplay is unchanged, no new abilities or stuff like that.

However, there're numerous small ASM changes, mainly on PLM and enemies so as to keep the player interested in exploring. Item progression and item count has been slightly altered. Sequence breaking is also possible to some extent (might not be as permissive as SM tough)

This is hack is more difficult than the original game but special/advanced techniques are NOT required to beat it.

Great hack. It's huge, full of places to explore, and pleasing to look at. There's some neat custom stuff in here too. Oh, and bar none the best Tourian in any hack ever.

There are some things to complain about though. You're going to get trolled by crumble blocks more than once, there's one or two rooms that are just evil. And most significantly, sometimes the required path forward is well hidden. This is made worse by the fact that you have so much of the map accessible to you, and it's not always clear where you should be searching. The worst offenders are the first visit to Norfair, and of course the famous Zaridia.

In the end, the good overpowers the bad and I highly recommend giving it a playthrough.

Z-Factor is a masterpiece. It strikes a near perfect balance of challenge and exploration in a massive new world. This is everything that a hack should want to be.

There is a large amount of exploration, a lot of secrets hidden throughout, and what is easily the greatest Tourian ever made. There are some potential cons for the average player. The hack is not easy and will challenge the player. The size and amount of twisted exploration and path finding required might turn some off too. There are a large number of spikes, and a few troll spots thrown in for good measure as well. But in spite of those, the hack shines as a sterling example of an amazing hack done with mostly vanilla resources.

And of course, the first blind playthrough of Zaridia is a memory to cherish forever. Highly recommend you check the hack out. The latest version makes some things easier, but I also suggest the 1.0 patch for the full affect of the original creation.

Very well-done hack that's faithful to the tile-placement of the original, yet still has a completely different experience. It's really just kinda in it's own genre that's you'd have to play to understand. Recommended.

I'm bringing down the rating on this one. Know why? It's not the god-like hack some people might tell you it is. It has the open-ended exploration of Ice Metal, but not the assurance of mind that you won't get dropped into a stupid situation at any door you deign to enter. It has a cut-out sequence of progression, but good luck trying to find your way forward at certain points in the game - more than likely you'll find yourself lost in a sea of hallways and dead-ends that contain nasty slip-ups capable of sending you back ten, twenty minutes of progress, or more on a death. I'm fairly sure I reached all the way to Gravity, personally, but I'm still not sure if I actually completed the hack in its entirety; that's a testament to the far-reaching complexity only the hack's author seems to understand. It was still an effort on his part, though, and something to be explored if you have both the time and the patience!

This hack frustrates me. Frequent design flaws in the levels that punish the player just for walking forward (anti-sonic rooms, crumble blocks that require savestates to get around if you don't want to suddenly lose 5+ rooms worth of progress, etc.) and the levels are uninteresting once you get over the shiny new enemies that woo you up to morphball and then proceed to disappear.

The hype goes over my head. It's a brand new world, but it sucks and can't really be played without a map. Pass.

Don't get me wrong. Z-Factor is a great hack, compared to a lot of the junk we see today. I understand effort of all kinds has been placed into the hack itself, for example the many, many strange happenings at the start of the game. Very cool. Later on though, Z-Factor just seems like one larger, harder, ordinary Full Hack, not an Overhaul. Why? Because the many happenings from the beginning of the game become less frequent, and it somewhat feels that Meta puts less effort into the middle sections of the hack. Some rooms with spikes and Crumble blocks placed, a sign of little to no inspiration. Little to no hint of progression, leaving the player Stumped upon where to go, seeing as the world is so open and the progression is changed. Though Tourian was indeed the highlight of the hack, I wouldn't put this on my play list.

Solid hack. Very polished level design, although a bit too unforgiving. If you pay close attention you can usually figure out where to go next. Except for Maridia -- that was one point where I couldn't even figure out where to go with a map.

But overall, progression is great. Interesting mechanics are peppered throughout the game at a good pace. The difficulty is challenging but not exactly punishing, which is a great place to be. Fill that with some interesting sequences and departures from the vanilla game, and you have yourself a winner.

This hack reminds me of the first time I played Super Metroid. I died a lot, didn't know where to go, and it took me a long time to finish. But after finishing it, I wanted to play it again, and when I did, it was a lot easier. This hack is pretty difficult at the beginning, but it eases up after you start collecting major items. Exploration is nice, there is an intended path, but there are also sequence breaks that aren't too difficult to pull off (kind of like vanilla Super Metroid).

I highly recommend this hack to anyone who has at least beat the original Super Metroid. This hack can help you increase your skills as a SM player.

By the way, this hack has the BEST Tourian by far out of any hack I have seen or played. It is easily the best part of the hack. I won't spoil anything because the best way to experience it is to play it without knowing anything other than that it is AMAZING.

Fun hack and well-designed in terms of combat, tiling, and the overall size and layout of the world, but frustrating as all hell because of the Milon's Secret Castle-esque style to it. It shouldn't be so convoluted to find the intended path forward. Lower Norfair was obnoxious in this regard, almost every room required an unintuitive, roundabout approach while getting to Ridley. Did navigating rooms really have to be this painstakingly challenging? Couldn't it be a little more...straightforward?

Also, while Tourian was indeed fantastic, the escape was a bit overly challenging too. Either the time limit should be increased, or the animals should be easier to get to. Without tool assistance, saving the animals is damn near impossible with how out of the way they are.

I was told to try out 1.0 first. That got me as far as pre-Wrecked Ship cause yay blind grapple jumps! Not before other frustrating things, but it was at least semi-tolerable up to that point. I would then update to the latest version, which is 1.3 as of this posting. The blind grapple jumps were easier, but still incredibly annoying to pull off.

Then came the Wrecked Ship itself.

...Ugh.

One section of the ship has you traversing through a morph tunnel with unavoidable crumble blocks. Falling below nets you a round-trip back through the Wrecked Ship which requires more suitless underwater shenanigans. After several attempts to bombjump across, I threw my arms up in frustration and said "no" to this hack.

This is one of the first full hacks that I completed, and is still one of my favorites. To me, Z-factor is like the Super Metroid version of "Ocarina of Time: Master Quest". It's is larger, and more difficult, but not to an extreme degree. It is both familiar and different at the same time. There are places where you might want to cheat a little bit and find out your next move by asking around or finding some information online, but, for the most part, a little exploration will eventually take you where you need to go, and that should be always be your first move, because that is what really makes this hack stand out. Exploration in hacks can often feel cumbersome, involving a lot of backtracking or finding major items in obscure locations, whereas Z-factor felt very much like the original game, but on a larger scale, and I mean that in the very best way. I guess the best praise I can give to this hack was that I felt like I did when I played the original Super Metroid for the first time, and for me, and a I'm sure many others who have played SM over and over again, this game satisfies that longing to experience SM like that again. Other hacks have been more ambitious, but doing something simple extremely well, as Z-factor does, often beats doing something complex at the expense of excellence, in my opinion. Whether you've beaten SM a few times, or know Zebes like the back of your hand, this game is for you. 9.5/10

This hack kind of hits a middle ground for me. The level design here is spot on and the rooms look amazing; however, the way you navigate this hack is so convoluted that it takes so long to figure out where to go. The beginning is rather interesting, but the excitement of this hack slowly wanes into tedium to no end. My biggest gripe with this hack is the persistence of the one-way passages. The map is so restrictive in where you can go and when, and most of the major upgrades are behind hard to find paths that take a while to find.

This hack also feels very linear. One item leads to another, and the only sequence breaks I know of involve gate glitches or the Super Secret Room, the latter of which I did. I had heard of the tedium of the Wrecked Ship, so I decided to so the SSR. Using a map and savestates it wasn't too bad, but I can only imagine trying to do it blind with neither of those two things. This brings me to my main complaint: Zaridia. This area is so convoluted and restrictive that a map is almost required to get to Draygon.

In general, the level design of some of these rooms later in the hack feels downright mean. Maybe it's my fault because I decided to go through Lower Norfair before getting Space Jump, (Which is only one hex-edit away from being possible) and I had a bad time. After beating Ridley, I went through the maze that is Zaridia, then backtracked all the way around the world to get to the back of the Wrecked Ship. This would have been more tolerable if there were more ways to navigate through the world in faster ways as you progress.

Despite all those gripes, Tourian was amazing. Everything Meta did with the FX to create this final area is perfect. The escape is pretty brutal though; you HAVE to know where to go or else you will die. There are also a few mean rooms in the escape, (If you've beaten this hack, you know what I mean) but it's pretty fun once you get it down.

Don't get me wrong, I want to like this hack, but there are so many annoying things about playing this hack that I found myself frustrated going through so many places. If you think you're up to the challenge, by all means, play this hack. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Original Score: 3 Chozo Orbs

Edit after my second playthrough:

This hack was much more enjoyable on a second playthrough, and I can more so see why so many people like it. The beginning and Tourian are still great, and I like the custom graphics, but I still found the middle part of the hack becoming dull after a while. Some rooms still feel a bit annoying in design, while paths feel arbitrarily linear. There are lots of circles to loop, and most of them end up with one-way passages that don't stay open after you've used them, causing you to have to make the same loop again later. There are also still a few tiling errors that should be fixed, but I think for the most part it's fine.

Lower Norfair was annoying and so was the Wrecked Ship
Everything else was nice. Maridia wasn't as bad as people made it out to be and Tourian was the second best I've played in a hack, only to Redesign Axeil.